Funder Spotlight: GaDOE’s 21st Century Community Learning Centers

If you haven’t heard the big news, YELLS is a 21st Century Community Learning Center!  After many years of applying for this game-changing federal grant through the Georgia Department of Education, our perseverance was rewarded with funding beginning in the 2017-2018 school year.  The City of Marietta graciously serves as the fiscal agent for this five-year grant that strengthens our partnership with Marietta City Schools and positions us to move the needle for our youth’s academic success.  This collaborative, community-centered approach unites all stakeholders to bridge school, home, and community, resulting in 1) improved academic achievement for youth, 2) youth with the soft skills and positive mindset to thrive in school and career and 3) increased parent engagement in their child’s education.

Ask any YELLS student, parent, staff, volunteer or supporter and they’ll tell you YELLS is synonymous with “Being a Leader!” From our inception, YELLS has utilized our servant leadership program model to develop leaders who capitalize on their assets while building their skills, in spite of their challenges.  However, while our youth rise as servant leaders who invest in their community, they were still struggling personally in school.

Of course, we always provided homework help and creative academic lessons to help our youth grow academically. Now, though, as the Marietta YELLS 21^st Century Community Learning Center, we’re supplementing our current YELLS Afterschool and Community Action Cafe programs through thoughtfully designed academic interventions informed by a stronger, more purposeful connection to school-day learning.  The 21st Century Community Learning Centers grant funds two new, innovative positions that bridge school-day learning with our work at YELLS.  A Scholar Success Specialist for our

elementary youth and Business Scholar Success Coach for our teens can be found during the school day visiting Marietta City Schools and connecting with teachers and our Scholars’ curriculum.  After school, they bring this knowledge back to inform their work with our YELLS Scholars as well as the work of an academic team, including a Reading Instructor, English Language Arts Specialist, and Math Specialist.  Academic support continues to utilize the YELLS hands-on and interactive delivery style, with lessons and interventions now targeted to better address identified student needs, in real time. These YELLS team members provide case management and support and offer academic interventions, but ultimately empower our youth to own their educational success, the same way they own their community’s success.  Check out the music video our teens made to see how community-building fuels this motivation for personal achievement for our teens:

This first year of funding has been an adventure and a learning experience for sure!  The federal reporting requirements and guidelines accompanying this funding are quite intensive, yet well worth the resources they bring to support our youth.  We’re proud to report we passed our first monitoring visit with flying colors.  The Georgia Department of Education lauded our successful first-year implementation, sharing: “Program leadership has a vested interested in providing quality programming to students and is wiling to do whatever it takes to have a successful program.”  They specifically called out our incredible retention rate of 126.67% regular attendees and long-term engagement over our promised enrollment.  Another benefit of the 21st CCLC grant is funding to engage professional evaluators to assess our programs.  This new partnership with the KSU A.L. Burruss Institute of Public Policy and Research provided invaluable feedback and data analysis to help us assess the effectiveness of our interventions and revise and strengthen our strategies.  We successfully achieved 7/10 of our objectives.  Some highlighted achievements include:

• 82.1% (of 95 youth) improved by one letter grade (or more or maintained an A or B) in math or language arts.
• 92.7% (76/82 surveyed youth) of youth reported improvement in at least one soft skill.
• 77.6% of elementary-school youth reported that they have made better choices since participating in YELLS
• 83.9% of high school teens agreed they can get what they want by working hard
• 88.9% of parents report that YELLS helps them feel more connected to their community
• 75.4% of parents indicated that they have learned at least one new strategy to support their child’s education at home

The full Summative Evaluation is available here.  Overall, these results demonstrate great progress, especially considering that 87% of our high school youth were failing a core subject at the start of the school year.  In this first year of implementation, we’ve laid the foundation to better understand the academic needs of our youth and are well-equipped to improve and grow our impact in year two!

We are so grateful to the Georgia Department of Education for their investment in our community and the City of Marietta for leading this initiative as fiscal agent for this funding, Marietta City Schools, and our dozens of other partners committed to working with us to offer dynamic, transformative out-of-school time programming to the youth of Franklin Gateway.  With these incredible partners, the Marietta YELLS 21^st Century Community Learning Center is bringing together partners, parents, and residents to create a community center of learning, leading, and serving that puts our Franklin Gateway youth at a competitive edge in school, in the community, and in life.